Sugoi & Yokunai

Portland makes the WSJ. Its crime-friendly policies that made three major retailers flee the city, have made national news.

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OpenAI quietly removes ban on military use of its AI tools. The siren song of money was too great to ignore. Is this how Skynet will be created?

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What3Words has a plan to map every location on earth to a three-word mnemonic that can be used instead of numeric longitude-latitude coordinates. Earth's surface area is divided up into 3-meter squares, according to this scheme. Interesting concept, but I already don't like the words associated with my home. Any of them.

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The Floorp browser looks interesting. It's a fork of Midori, which is a Firefox-derived browser. Privacy focused, faster and more customizable. All good, but will my extensions work?

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11 Oregon snow storm blunders. Yeah, I don't recall being in one this bad in over thirty years since I've been around here. At least this pointed out the stupidity of relying exclusively on EVs and banning natural gas. And promoting tank-less water heaters. You can argue with lefties all you can, and they won't listen, until reality hits like it did this past week. Yeah, Oregon took the top spot in who had the most power outages during the winter storm. Even more than the midwestern states.

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Passengers must now do their own plane inspection before flying, because flight maintenance crews are no longer competent to do so themselves.

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Nearly all the commercially available artificial sweeteners were discovered by accident. What does this mean?

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Weird. Ths term means something different now. Weird when I was growing up is different from today's weird. It was more benign and fairly harmless. Today's weird is pathological.

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Bitcoin is NOT anonymous.

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Unbelievable! Too much of the research that comes out of Harvard and Dana-Farber is fabricated. Is it any wonder that Americans have lost faith in the value of college?

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Stupid. Read this about how a West Hills resident couldn't get a permit to have a tree chopped down, only to have it fall down during the ice storm. Because the City of Portland couldn't be bothered to issue the permit. Then the Oregonian says that we need to build a culture of resilience.  How about a culture of competence???

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And I hear they might take this Friday off for a "Teachers Admin Day".

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Oregon needs a broad path to stem homelessness. Broad path? I think Oregon needs to build a facility to put the drug-abusing, randomly-violent, property-defacing, disease-carrying people in. Separate them from their drugs. Force them to get on the path of rehab. It would have been easier had this problem been taken care of much earlier, but now it has to be a bulk effort, which is distasteful, but absolutely necessary. Instead, Oregon outsources the job to "agencies". These agencies know that if the problem is actually solved, there would be no need for them. Yes, Oregon has way too many committees, and not enough action.  So much ineptitude.

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Portland can't have nice things. REI is moving out of Portland soon. Going to Beaverton. And Hoffman Construction is moving out of downtown Portland for Lake Oswego. Enough is enough.

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This is why inflation isn't going away. Biden Cancels $5 Billion in Student Debt. This is going to affect a significant part of the economy, and injects more fiat currency into the economy, without any underlying productivity gain to society, keeping inflation high. Union employees will complain about their reduced purchasing power. And it's not debt cancellation. It's debt transferrence.

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Have you heard loud booms when it was freezing? Someone thought it was another transformer blowing. Instead it could be frost quakes. 

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Fingertip oxygen sensors can fail on dark skin — now a physician is suing. You would think that these oximeter companies would have done some testing before releasing their machines. Or have a setting for different colored skin. Or incorporated some sensor calibration first. I guess that's what happens when these devices are made in China.

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Dear Doctor: Is it true COVID boosters are creating cancer recurrence in some patients? Ah, people are starting to take notice. Do you think he's heard of the plasmid contamination, and what it signifies? He says "you can safely disregard the claim, since that isn’t a real entity. That’s fearmongering." Then he says that the vax "provides pretty good protection against infection for a few months". Only a few months? What's the point of getting it? With regard to the safety and efficacy of getting the vax with cancer treatment, he says "your oncologist can help you decide the optimal time to get the vaccine if you are undergoing chemo". The truth is that oncologist don't really know how to juggle chemotherapy and the vax, because there's not been any testing on this. Many wait until a chemotherapy session is over before recommending the vax. Others say to get it right before chemotherapy starts, or just before the next cycle. It's just guessing, because no one knows for sure.

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Multnomah County can't handle the mental health crisis and asks the state to take over. But is the state really competent to handle it?

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Oregon's using more fossil fuels than before. Face it, "green energy" sources can only deliver so far.

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And Milford Regional Medical Center in Massachusetts can refuse to treat you if you spout "hate speech" or even if your boddy language offends someone. Don't wear your MAGA cap there.

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Sports Illlustrated is no more. Destroyed by wokeism. No one wants to see the swimsuit edition anymore, when certain pictures can make you physically ill. Good riddance.

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This could be interesting. Icelandic Faultline Has Awakened After 800 Years. Perhaps we'll see other sites along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge come to life.

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China is going into a recession. People are feeling it. Gone are the days during the Obama administration when China was handed so much wealth. It was unsustainable. Perhaps the only reason why China isn't benefiting from Biden being in office is that the United States is also suffering, and that there are significantly lower purchasers of Chinese goods. Also, many companies are realizing that Trump was right, and are now moving out of China.

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R.I.P. PDQ Bach. I saw his books and listened to some of his programs around the late 1970s. It was sort of humorous, but you had to have some knowledge about Baroque music to understand his jokes.

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Coder's Delight. Everything you wanted to know about text editors.

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The State’s Leading Psychiatrist Says Oregon’s Approach to Mental Health Is Wrong. I only disagree that we do indeed need more "cuckoo's nest" hospitals. He may think it's cruel, but I think it's necessary. When things get worse, which I'm sure they will, Dr. Keepers will probably agree. Portland's literally turning into a city of zombies now.

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Dutch Bros is slowly moving out of Oregon. The article tries to make it sound like it's not a big deal, but it is. This is just the first step.

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You think that's the reason? Low Vaccine Take-Up Blamed for Covid Deaths and Hospitalizations. Being that the people who get recurrent COVID are the ones who got the vax, I don't think this is the case. It's really looking like those who got the jab are chronically less healthy than the unvaxxed, and are more susceptible to infections and other causes of disability, such as POTS, chronic fatigue, cancer and thromboembolic complications.

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Google is getting to be full of fake news. Or so they say. But who is to judge? It seems that what the writer claims is fake news is stuff that appears on conservative news sites, which tend to be found true eventually.

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Proven time and again. EVs are not suitable for general use in America. They are great when you're a Silicon Valley worker commuting up and down 101. But for the rest of us, nah.

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Ticking time bomb.  America has a retirement crisis. Yes it does, and this will be a major crisis in ten to twenty years. The savings rate is abysmal. Democrats will call for a national pension, because they always think that solutions are just a Congressional bill away. People are just not saving for the future, thinking that someone or something will come along and bail them out. Just like many students haven't been paying off their loans for the past three years, thinking that Biden is going to make it all go away.

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Portland hipsters always think that the rep on Portland is overblown.

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The Silent Epidemic Eating Away Americans’ Minds. There's an epidemic, all right. Whether it's related to social media alone is not clear, but I agree that it's a major factor. Others have noticed that Increasing Psychopathic Behavior Is A Sign That Society Is On The Verge Of Breaking Down. Maybe this also has something to do with it:

And now:
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Most workplace wellness programs don't boost well-being. This is true. When the Ronin was working, "wellness programs" were offered for those who were feeling stress. Of course, nothing was done to fix the cause of the stress. That would have been more effective, but would likely lessen the profit margin. So just do yoga, or do mindfulness meditation (which is almost impossible to do when you're already stressed) and get back to work.

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Self-checkout lanes at the grocery store may go away. Too easy to steal. These conveniences are only for people who behave themselves. They are no longer appropriate for Americans at large. Because an increasing number of Americans don't give a fig about being lawful. Case in point:

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Trump won decisively yesterday. And some people are saying some pretty dumb things.

• Democrats might put Trump in jail, so we have to support DeSantis and Haley.
• Iowa victory proves that white Christians are racists.
• Trump is "too extreme" to be on the ballot.
• Haley lost due to racism. Iowa wants minorities to bow down to them.
  

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This is great. SCOTUS decides that people should be able to get their apps outside the App Store environment.

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Celestron's new telescope has A.I. built in. It's not clear that they're using generative A.I. Maybe just computer vision stuff.

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After outcry, Tina Kotek cancels immediate implementation of new tax plans. Until after the election. So was it really necessary then? Or was it all for fluff stuff?

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Watch out on that on-ramp from I-405 to Sunset Hwy. There's a chop shot in there.

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Why landing on the moon is proving more difficult today than 50 years ago. "Lunar landers fell out of favor." But why? So because of this, it's harder to do testing?

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You can't afford it, and that's my problem...how? Sorry, but this was an unsecured loan. Someone took a risk giving you the loan money. You had a three year payment moratorium and you still can't pay it? Why should anyone trust you with a financial decision anymore?

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The Rich Are Different: Personality Traits of Wealthy People. Yes, they do think differently. "They deal with defeats and setbacks differently than other people — they blame themselves, not others or society at large."

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What happened to the artificial-intelligence investment boom? It's not over – there's more to come. There's a lot happening now, and it's just that Wall Street isn't really noticing. Much of it is just copycat stuff, but research is going on. Right now, we gotta see who is going to survive the vector database shakedown, and whether the best solution will successfully and seamlessly incorporate semantic search. And how to greatly reduce hallucinations and reduce the need to careful prompting to extract useful information. And last but not least, make it local and private. The best RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) hasn't been identified yet. And it has to be turnkey enough so that the average consumer can really use it. 

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Fauci now admits that there was no science behind "six feet of social distancing". I bet there was no science behind stickers on the floor, or plexiglas shields, or allowing only a set amount of people into a store. There was no clear science behind masking either, at least not for SARS-CoV2.

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A warming fire, likely started by a homeless person, resulted in an art gallery catching fire, and priceless artworks being damaged. How much more will Seattle put up with until they start to deal with the homeless problem?

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Afterlife Industry? There's a risk that someone may recreate you after you are dead, without your consent. Not likely to happen to me, but there are some for which this might not be desirable. But what are you to do? Especially if the part that is recreated is something that puts you in a bad light?

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Jerry Nadler says illegals are needed to do menial tasks. I could easily see Nadler advocating for continued slavery back in the 1850s.

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SCOTUS is going to review the Martin v Boise case (in the Johnson vs Grants Pass case). Let's hope they rule more sensibly, because the homeless are ruining our cities. Yes, taxpayers have the right to clean cities. Maybe this will force the drug abusers into treatment.

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Clackamas County dismantles their DEI Office. Clackamas County was always more conservative than the rest.

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Who thought this was a good idea?  Rolling blackouts will be a fact of life on Oahu.  The Kapolei Telsa battery site is online again and Oahu will have to deal with the rolling blackouts. What crap.

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The Chinese have developed a nuclear battery, the Betavolt BV100, based on nickel-63.  Nuclear batteries have existed before, but have not been commercially available to regular consumers for various reasons. The Chinese hope this will catch on and sell.

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People on Reddit are lamenting that Theo Chocolate is closing. But do they know that Theo Dark Chocolate had high lead and cadmium levels?

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